"We are very focused on getting the right result for students and we have a number of quality control systems in place during the marking process. We also carry out detailed analysis to continuously improve the quality of marking. However, unfortunately we don’t always get it right and if a school is unhappy with a student’s results, they can ask us to take another look.

“In most cases where a review leads to a change, the results will go up or down by only one or two marks. Significant increases are more unusual and automatically trigger a process where we look at all the school’s exam scripts in that subject.

“We appreciate how important exam results are to students and schools and we are very sorry if we don’t get it right first time.”

The leak revealed the names and marks of the undergraduates who achieved the lowest scores in exams taken before Christmas.

The exams are known as 'collections'. They're used to monitor students' progress and do not form part of the final degree mark.

"We can confirm that owing to a clerical error the collection marks of a small number of University College students were accidentally included in an email sent out to students on 13 January. We would like to apologise to all students affected by this inadvertent disclosure for any distress this has caused and reassure them that we are investigating exactly how this happened and are determined to make sure this does not happen again. University College takes the treatment of sensitive data very seriously."

Tens of thousands of 11-year-olds start a week of tests today to show what they've learned in primary school. This year there's a controversial new exam in grammar and punctuation which pupils sit for the first time tomorrow.